They are playing all around.

Happily, there is more talk about playing, and how children’s play fits in with the lives of adults — and that doesn’t mean driving them to nursery school or to the soccer field. We are referring to normal play that is not structured or organized or planned by adults.

Jody at Gumbo Lily wrote a wonderfully descriptive post about how her own grandchildren play near her while she works. Of course it makes most of us remember our own childhoods and the kind of fun we had all by ourselves. If you haven’t already, I hope you will comment on her post or here with some of your memories along that line.

Of outdoor play, I remember in my own early years making dolls’ houses in the dirt under orange trees, and the classic mud pies. If the children are “entertaining themselves,” and the adults are taking the opportunity to get some work done, the vast majority of what children do with their time is undocumented, and likely unremembered also. Two more ways we don’t control it.

snail toys

And lest someone think that a big ranch is necessary for the kind of play we’re talking about, I’m posting the only picture I can find, other than what I put up on my last post, of me or my children playing alone. If they are occupied, and the adult is occupied, why, there is no one to hover with a camera.

This picture was taken just after we moved from the country to the city. When we had a huge garden next to a cow pasture and a blackberry bog, across the road from an abandoned orchard, we had no snails. So when we moved here where we now live, they were a new and fascinating object of play, which I definitely did not introduce as a science topic. I don’t know what all went on with those snails, but I had to laugh at the way every little thing can be a toy on what Jody call’s God’s playground.

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3 thoughts on “They are playing all around.”

Gotta love kids. If I ban screen time my younger children sulk for a few minutes, then go and find something else to do, which mostly involves mess and noise, inside or outside. I really want to embrace the creative mess but sometimes the promise of quiet and tidy in front of a screen is oh, so tempting…

While it's almost impossible to get my older son outside (he's 14 and has never really been an outdoors guy), I can push Will out the door and he's soon involved playing in the World Series or the Super Bowl (by himself). I remember making towns out of sticks and acorns.